Promised 30% annual returns and an AI supercomputer for mining – businessman faces 280 years in prison

A Nevada jury found Las Vegas businessman Brent Kovar guilty on 15 counts tied to a $24 million Ponzi scheme.

The charges include 11 counts of wire fraud, two counts of mail fraud, and two counts of money laundering.

According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Kovar pitched his company, Profit Connect, as a crypto mining operation powered by an AI supercomputer. He promised investors a fixed return of 15% to 30% APR along with a 100% money-back guarantee.

None of it was real. Payouts to earlier investors came entirely from cash brought in by new participants – the textbook definition of a Ponzi scheme.

Around 400 people fell for it. Kovar told them Profit Connect held cryptocurrency reserves worth hundreds of millions of dollars, when in reality the company had no assets at all. It had no way to pay out the promised interest or honor its money-back guarantee.

From the Department of Justice:

He used investor money to operate Profit Connect, to buy gifts for employees, to buy a house for himself, and to repay investors as if those repayments came from mining cryptocurrency and verifying cryptocurrency transactions.

Profit Connect ran from 2017 to 2021. It launched right as Bitcoin hit its first major rally, with the price topping $19,000 in December 2017, and buzzwords like "AI" and "supercomputer" made investors feel like they were getting in on groundbreaking financial technology.

Whether victims will ever see their money back remains unclear. Kovar himself faces a maximum sentence of 280 years across all counts.

Scams like this aren't rare in the crypto world. BitConnect, which launched the same year, promised guaranteed returns but instead funneled deposits into its organizers' private wallets, costing retail investors roughly $2 billion.

An even bigger case played out in China, where a Ponzi scheme operator collected around $6 billion from victims between 2014 and 2017 and converted it into 61,000 Bitcoin. She's since been arrested, but the fate of the seized cryptocurrency is still undecided, and it's unclear when – or if – victims will be compensated.